CHAPTER NINE

The Town of Torinox, the Northern Borders of the FarReach Dependency

I shbel slipped deeper into her fevered slumber, so that by the time the soldier returned with news of a town that was still partly inhabited some three hours ride to the southwest, Axis was unable to rouse her.

He frowned, worried, then lifted her as gently as he could and, instead of putting her back into the cart, propped her before him on his horse. The donkey-drawn cart would be too slow—he needed to get Ishbel to aid as soon as possible.

Axis had not really thought about what he might find when he met up with Ba’al’uz’ men and their charge, but it wasn’t the slaughter he had actually encountered, and most certainly not the sudden meeting with the Icarii. That sight of them, the sight of them being slaughtered, had wrenched at something very deep in his soul. He’d been living almost in a state of unnatural serenity, almost a fugue, since he’d been hauled back into this world.

Witnessing the death of those Icarii had propelled him into full life.

Stars! The spectacle of those Icarii, lying in almost unrecognizable tatters of flesh and drifting, blood-spattered feathers.

As he rode through the night, Ishbel clutched before him, Axis thought about the events of the day. The conversation with BroadWing had unsettled him badly. It had felt as though he were being dragged back into a world and a life that was not completely welcome—or welcoming, for BroadWing had certainly regarded Axis with some suspicion.

And how else was BroadWing supposed to react, eh? The Icarii who were left had been forced to manage with such great loss and tragedy that Axis had no idea how they had coped.

Suddenly he cursed to himself. Why hadn’t he asked BroadWing about StarDrifter? Gods, if StarDrifter was alive somewhere then BroadWing may well have known about it.

What a lost opportunity.

Axis rode, one arm about Ishbel, his mind and heart in turmoil. Even though he’d now been riding for almost fourteen hours, he felt no exhaustion, only a terrible kind of nervous energy that, after an hour or two, he realized was a deep, unrelenting yearning for the man he had once been. Not the Star God, not even the StarMan, but those wonderful, intense years when he had been discovering himself as an Enchanter and as an Icarii prince. When he had been doing and discovering—two women he had loved beyond imagining; power beyond comprehension; excitement and life and energy and fear.

The sheer headiness of hurtling forward through life, of discoveries both wondrous and terrifying, of doing.

As a Star God, Axis had stopped moving forward. His extraordinary journey had come to a conclusion.

He had stopped doing, and that had been the ruination of him.

Now here he was, hurtling through life once more, a company of fellow soldiers streaming out behind him, a stolen queen held tight in his arms, the stars whirling over his head, and the prospect of new discoveries, new challenges, new frontiers both glorious and dreadful before him.

Axis’ arm tightened about Ishbel, his heels booted his horse into even greater effort, and he grinned, and wondered what adventures lay before him.

Ishbel knew almost nothing of that wild ride. In years to come she would remember flashes of it: the violent motion of the horse, Axis’ arm tight about her, and the warmth and scent of his body, the glint of teeth as he grinned, the stars spinning overhead.

The pain.

Her fever was getting worse, and it sank dark fingers of agony into every single one of her joints. Any movement was a nightmare of hurt: not just her joints, but her head, which felt as if it wanted to explode, and her stomach, which now twisted and cramped as badly as if it had been flung onto a bed of hot coals.

She escaped as far as she could into unconsciousness, but even that held little relief for her. She dreamed, visionary nightmares that melded effortlessly into one another.

Her usual nightmare came to her first: the Lord of Elcho Falling, standing in the snow, his back to her, then slowly becoming aware of her presence, his head turning, turning, turning, and then the torrent of despair and pain that engulfed her world as he laid eyes on her and opened his mouth to speak.

This time it was worse than she’d ever experienced it before.

Then Ishbel dreamed of StarWeb whispering vicious hatred into her ear. Maximilian, turning on Ishbel in revulsion, and blaming her for the deaths of Evenor, Allemorte, and Borchard. StarWeb, exploding in a red mist of blood and bone and flesh. Maximilian, hearing the news of his lover’s death, and breaking down in grief.

Maximilian, blaming Ishbel for StarWeb’s death.

Herself, giving birth to a twisted, lumpen mass destroyed by Ba’al’uz’ poisons.

Maximilian blaming her for his much-wanted child’s death, too.

She was unaware that occasionally she called out his name—Maxel! Maxel! Maxel!—and that Axis’ arm tightened fractionally about her every time she did so.

Worst of all, though, was the dream in which the Great Serpent appeared to her, hissing and spitting, cursing her for losing Maximilian, and any chance they had of preventing tragedy and annihilation.

What kind of foolish woman are you, the Great Serpent hissed, to so lose Maximilian?

And then, sometimes, dreams of Maximilian and the Great Serpent faded completely, and she was filled with a sense of total loss and foreboding, and she knew then that the Lord of Elcho Falling was close.

Torinox was more village than town, but it had an inn still open, and, blessed be to all gods, it had a physician called Zeboath waiting inside that inn. Apparently he’d been due to leave for the resettlement convoys gathering in the east the previous week, but his horse had needed rest to recover from a slight lameness, and he was still in the town. Zeboath had spent his time waiting, so far as Axis could see, sampling most of the innkeeper’s remaining stocks of ale.

Still, Zeboath was a pleasant enough man, in both manner and aspect, and seemed competent despite his slight intoxication, giving Ishbel a quick examination as Axis carried her in.

“She’s burning with fever,” Zeboath said. “She needs to be put to bed immediately, given a bath, and she needs to have fluids.”

“She tried to drink for me,” said Axis, “but was unable to keep the water down.”

“Fever?” said the innkeeper. “Fever? I am not so sure I want her to stay—”

Axis turned to the man, Ishbel still in his arms. “I hold in my arms the Queen of Escator, and your tyrant’s future bride. If you want to refuse her aid, I am not entirely sure that Isaiah will understand.”

The innkeeper shut his mouth with an audible snap, and hastened to show Axis to a room set aside on the ground floor.

Zeboath did what he could for Ishbel, but it was not very much. He and the innkeeper’s daughter washed the filth of travel and sickness from her, and the physician managed to get some herbal medicine down Ishbel’s throat, which he said would ease both her fever and her nausea. He also left pieces of juice-filled fruit in her mouth so that, even in her deep sleep, she could suck moisture and sweetness from them.

“But for the rest,” Zeboath murmured to Axis as they stood by the door of Ishbel’s chamber, “I can do little. I do not know what drugs she was given, so cannot counteract them. As for her fever…” He stopped, looking back through the door to where Ishbel lay motionless in the bed. “I cannot yet tell what has caused it, although I do not think it a plague or blight. More likely a result of weeks of little food and water, of sorrow and terror, if what you tell me about her circumstances is correct.”

“And her baby?”

Zeboath shrugged. “Who can tell? She is about halfway through her pregnancy and the child is small. I cannot feel it move. She will either lose it, or manage to keep it until birth, but what damage may have been done to it, I don’t—” He stopped suddenly, giving a shamefaced half smile. “And I should stop saying ‘I don’t know,’ yes?”

Axis put his hand briefly on the man’s shoulder, instinctively liking and trusting him. “You have done what you can.” He glanced at Ishbel himself. “Until she wakes, and can speak, I doubt there’s little anyone can do for her.”

“Her husband?”

“I have no idea where he is,” said Axis. “North of the FarReach Mountains, I assume.”

He remembered what BroadWing had said—Maximilian will tear the earth apart for her—and he wondered how long Maximilian would stay north of the FarReach Mountains once BroadWing had reported back to him.

Zeboath was now looking at Ishbel with a degree of softness Axis found a little surprising. “If I had lost such a wife,” Zeboath said, “I’d go mad trying to discover her again.” Now he looked back at Axis. “Yet you say she is destined for Isaiah.”

Axis hesitated to speak, wondering what he could say, then realized he had been handed a god-given opportunity to see just what Isaiah’s subjects thought of their tyrant.

“You know what Isaiah is like,” he said, with his own half shrug.

Zeboath gave a soft snort. “He is what Aqhat and his childhood has made him,” he said. “He is better than his father.”

“In what way?”

Now Zeboath looked at Axis curiously. “You’re not from this land, are you? You speak the language well, but too precisely, and with a strange intonation.”

“I come originally from the lost land of Tencendor,” Axis said, “now earning my keep as a mercenary for Isaiah.”

“And as his spy?”

“No. Whatever you say is safe. I ask questions only to sate my own curiosity.”

“Perhaps. Well, Isaiah’s father, Turmebt, was…” Zeboath sighed. “A man not given to understanding and tolerance. A man who was given to indulging his tastes, however repulsive they might be. Isembaard would have celebrated his death, save that people were terrified even of his ghost. Isaiah was like him when he was a young man, so reports have it, but then he changed, for which most of Isembaard is thankful.”

“Oh? Changed? When, and how?”

“I live a long way from Aqhat, Axis, and I do not know the precise how. But it was within the first two or three years of Isaiah ascending the throne. Sometime after, or perhaps even during, his campaign against the Eastern Independencies.”

That campaign again. Axis was more consumed by curiosity than ever, and wondered if he would one day become close enough to Isaiah to ask him about that campaign.

“Isaiah is not now the man his father once was,” Zeboath finished.

“Indeed, that is warm praise for Isaiah.”

“Aye, I suppose it is. I do not think people particularly like Isaiah, but they do not yet hate him, either.

He has to prove himself.”

“He has yet to conquer.”

“If you say so,” Zeboath said. Then, before Axis could query him on that comment, the physician went on. “You look exhausted, Axis. Go to bed. You can do no more for the lady tonight. I know I need my bed. Good night.”

Rather than go to his room, Axis slouched down into a chair by Ishbel’s bed, watching her for perhaps a half hour, and trying to go to sleep. But, even though he was desperately tired, it eluded him, and eventually Axis sighed and moved to drag his pack from where Insharah had left it, meaning to examine the rose pyramid.

He found it soon enough, wrapped in some oilcloth and stuffed into the center of the pack where it would be most protected, and he drew out the bundle and sat back down in the chair. He’d never handled the one that Isaiah had, and was curious as to what—

The instant his flesh touched the cool glass Axis gave a startled gasp, almost dropping the pyramid.

Stars, no! Surely not!

Trembling so badly he had to bite his lip and force his hands to move, Axis wrapped both palms about the rose pyramid.

It touched the Star Dance.

It touched the Star Dance.

Axis could barely breathe. His chest had constricted so much it hurt.

The Star Dance was filtering into his body via the pyramid.

Not much, a tiny amount, but…oh, stars, stars!

Far to the north, Eleanon stood by the open window of the main chamber of Crowhurst. Lister and Inardle had gone to bed hours ago, but Eleanon was enjoying standing in the frigid draft of air, watching it turn into ice as it passed across his body, and looking out over the frozen landscapes.

Suddenly his head whipped about and he stared at the spire—as he called the pyramid—sitting on a table to one side of the room.

Instantly he strode toward the table.

Axis sat in his chair, his entire body crouched over the pyramid. It had Enchanter power in it, but somehow different. It was Icarii-made, but yet different.

And it touched the Star Dance!

Almost panicked, Axis tried to remember the simplest enchantment he could. Perhaps something for warmth, this chamber was so damned cold, something to—

The pyramid glowed, and Axis had the sense of someone standing deep within it, but just out of sight.

Eleanon had both hands wrapped about the pyramid, and held it against his chest so that whoever had Ba’al’uz’ pyramid (and it wasn’t Ba’al’uz, never that) could not see him.

It was Axis. The StarMan. Eleanon could feel it, throbbing through the pyramid.

And Axis had just felt the Star Dance through it.

So, Axis, Eleanon thought. Finally we touch.

“Axis StarMan,” he murmured. “My apologies…”

Then his hand tightened about the pyramid.

Axis cried out. Not in pain, but in loss. The pyramid in his hands had suddenly flared with an intense rose color—and then it had dulled into complete lifelessness, losing whatever color it had ever contained, to become a dull, pale gray.

All sense of the Star Dance had vanished.

Axis gripped the pyramid, willing it back to life, but nothing happened. The object he held in his hands was now as lifeless as if someone had closed the door on its power. He did not know quite what had happened, but he felt that someone had cut the flow of power to the pyramid the instant they realized Axis was using it.

Axis lowered his head over the pyramid and wept. Partly in loss, for to have lost even such a faint touch of the Star Dance was almost impossible to bear, but also in sheer joy.

It was possible to touch the Star Dance again. It was. This was an object of great Icarii (or Icarii-like) power, woven with enchantment that was foreign to Axis, but only barely so.

Wherever Lister had got these pyramids from, it had not been from Dark-Glass Mountain.

The Star Dance was accessible again.

Axis was so focused on the glass pyramid and his own discovery that he did not realize Ishbel’s eyes had opened briefly and had watched him.

When Ishbel woke it was well past dawn. The room was bright, and she had trouble focusing. For some time shapes in the room blurred in and out of focus, and when finally she did manage to bring her vision back under control, it was to see Axis SunSoar, sitting in a chair at some distance from her bed, watching her.

“Your fever has broken,” he said. “Zeboath—the physician—came in not an hour ago. He said you were out of any immediate danger.”

Ishbel did not directly respond, still a little disoriented. She lay quietly for a few minutes, looking at Axis, wondering about him. When he’d introduced himself yesterday (was it yesterday, or had she slept for weeks?) she had assumed that he could not possibly be the Axis SunSoar of legend, but now she was not so sure. He looked very much like the descriptions she’d heard of the Icarii StarMan: he had a tall lean grace, even slouched in the chair; wheat-colored hair pulled back into a tail at the nape of his neck; a clipped beard; and faded blue eyes. But it was his still watchfulness, and the aura of experience that hung about him, which made Ishbel revise her earlier conclusion. This was a man who had seen empires tumble and fall, who had caused their destruction, and who now tolerated her quiet regard with an infinite patience born, she thought, from a lifetime enduring cataclysmic events.

But mostly Ishbel reconsidered her original assessment because she was a priestess trained in the art and the world of gods, and this man stank of god power, even though he made every attempt to subdue it.

“Where am I?” Ishbel said finally.

“In a town called Torinox. I had to bring you here because—”

“Torinox? But what land, Axis? The men who took me told me nothing. I have no idea where I am.”

“My apologies. We are in the northern reaches of a great empire called the Tyranny of Isembaard. Have you heard of it?”

Ishbel gave a weak nod. “It is to the south of my homeland. By the gods, Axis, I am so far from home.”

“Maximilian will be searching for you.” Maximilian will tear apart the earth to find you.

“I doubt it.”

She saw Axis raise his brows at the bitterness in her voice.

“He thinks me responsible for a trail of death across the Central Kingdoms,” she said, “and one of the Icarii who died yesterday—it was yesterday?”

Axis gave a nod.

“One of the Icarii who died, StarWeb, was his lover. He will blame me for her death as well.”

Now Axis’ eyes livened with interest. “Maximilian Persimius kept an Icarii lover?”

“Yes.”

“Yet he cannot have found you too unattractive, Ishbel. You’re some five months gone with child.”

She moved a hand to her belly. “He wants the child. Not me, not anymore.”

Axis started to say something, then caught himself. Instead he came over to the bed, sat down on its edge, and felt her pulse.

“The man responsible for that trail of deaths,” he said softly, not looking at her, “was the man who captured you. A man called Ba’al’uz.”

“Why?”

Axis gave a shrug, as if he did not know. Ishbel thought about pursuing the subject, but in the end was too tired and felt too ill to summon the energy.

“Are you truly Axis SunSoar of legend?” she said.

“Aye.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“So did I, but I seem to have a habit of rising from the dead.”

“Axis?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for yesterday. And…I am sorry for the Icarii. I wish…”

He nodded, but changed the subject when he spoke. “You need to breakfast,” he said, “and regain your strength.”

“Will you take me home, Axis?”

He looked her full in the eye then. “I am sorry, Ishbel. I cannot.”

Ishbel turned her head away. “Where will you take me, then?”

“South, to a place called Aqhat.”

Ishbel was silent a long moment, and when she spoke her voice was very quiet.

“Axis, what is the ancient evil that lives south? What is it that threatens our world?”

When Lister rose in the morning, Eleanon told him that Axis SunSoar had one of the pyramids.

“Which one?” Lister asked, a little sharply.

“That which belonged to Ba’al’uz,” said Eleanon. “He must have left it with his men when he left for Coroleas.”

“Well, I suppose it better that Axis have his than Isaiah’s,” said Lister. “Did he—”

“He felt the Star Dance, yes,” said Eleanon. “I felt his gladness, his joy, here.” He tapped his chest.

“Did he see you?” Lister said.

Eleanon gave a shake of his head.

“Did he know you?” Lister asked.

Again the shake of the head, and Lister relaxed slightly. “Well, that is something. I hope you shut the thing down.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like the fact that Isaiah brought Axis back,” Lister said. “Why? What does Isaiah plan to do with him? And what is Axis going to say, my friend, if ever he meets you?”

“I have no desire to meet him. We cut our ties with the Icarii a long time ago, Lister. I owe Axis nothing, not friendship and certainly not loyalty. That belongs to you, as you know, and to the Lord of Elcho Falling.”